Rather a Tallinn order

Okay, apologies for the bad pun. I'll replace it with a better one if something comes to mind.

Saturday, 12:36 pm. I seem to be settling into a routine of writing one long blog post at the end of a multi-day adventure. We left Russian border control about fifteen minutes ago and are now about three hours away from St. Petersburg, if all goes as planned. It took me most of a day in Tallinn to realize that Moscow time and Tallinn time are an hour apart…and I wasn’t actually sure which one the bus ticket was printed in. As a result, I’ve been up for seven and a half hours and got to the bus station about an hour and a half early. A long shower and a quick nap should be very refreshing when I make it back to Petersburg, and then Easter service tonight!

So, Tallinn. I arrived at about two-thirty pm, changed some rubles at the bus station, followed the directions on my hostel booking form to the letter, and still managed to get massively lost in Old Town before finding my hostel. I was greeted by a handwritten sign on the door informing guests that the hostel was closed, so please go to the nearest information office. Not knowing where the hell that would be, I approached a couple of friendly English speakers in the major hotel across the street, found the information office, and was told that the hostel was closed for ‘electrical problems, or water, or something. They haven’t told us anything.’ Fortunately, the young woman in the Bureau for Massively Confused Tourists Who Speak No Estonian was able to show me a selection of other hostels on the map, and I actually ended up right in the heart of the Old Town, in a charming (and clean!) location. :D Did a little exploring that first afternoon, but I was really rather tired and kind of frustrated with the hassles, so I pulled into the hostel about six. The young Englishman in the bed across from me struck up a conversation, and Will and I had a fun evening in a very strange little hole-in-the-wall bar. :)

A word about this sort of an evening plan. Tallinn is a charming touristy city, but there’s very little to do at night, except for some interestingly located ‘nightclubs’ in the center of cobblestone streets. It’s also very expensive city, at least for someone who’s used to St. Petersburg. This bar we went to was actually my English friend’s find; the only way anyone would have noticed it would be the ATM outside. No sign or anything. But, we were able to try the local beer and the local liqueur, and meet some fascinating locals! Vana Tallinn is, basically, the best alcoholic beverage in existence: it’s a sort of spicy brown liqueur that goes down warm and works fast. I may or may not have brought a bottle back with me. >.> I managed to spend most of the evening holding conversations in Russian…including with Will, apparently, disregarding the fact that he only understands English.

Thursday: full touristy day! I explored a bunch of churches in the Old Town – the churches are the only way you know where you are in that cobblestoned maze of yellow buildings – and then took the tram out to what I believe was the western edge of the city. There’s a palace called Kadriorg over there, and an extensive garden, built by none other than Peter the Great. I swear, I can’t get away from this guy! Even half-covered in snow, the gardens are beautiful, and I spent several lovely hours just wandering through the gardens, the art museum, and down to the beach. Pirita tee is the name of the street that runs along the shore of the Gulf of Finland, and the opportunity to stroll down the beach in solitude in the springtime was spellbinding. It would have been slightly more so if the beach wasn’t three-quarters covered in ice, but the view was still fantastic. And yes, you’re all going to have to sit through two dozen pictures of the Black Sea when I get back. :)

I’m not sure whether the massive hordes of swans wandering the beach contributed to the spell or not. I will be the first to admit, I am VERY afraid of swans. Especially swans in large groups. They may be pretty when they’re floating, but they’re big, and they’re vicious, and when four of them start stalking up to you when you’re heading toward the stairs, nobody in their right mind will stand and pick a fight. There were a couple of mothers with very small children who were feeding the swans, and letting their kids play right by them, and I couldn’t help but think that one of those kids was going to lose a hand. ‘Get myself killed by large birds’ was not on my list of things to do during spring break.

Further down Pirita Tee are several museums, one of which was closed for electrical problems; actually, the babushka running the place informed me in Russian, ‘well, it’s not closed, you just won’t be able to see anything.’ A quick peek inside confirmed this to be true, and rather than wander around in the pitch black historic castle, I elected to continue wandering around in the sunlight. I found the Soviet war memorial called ‘The Impotent’s Dream’ by the locals (so the Lonely Planet guidebook tells me), and climbed up and sat on its crumbling steps for a while. Tallinn really is full of places that are conducive to sitting, thinking, and staring at the view. Not a bad plan for spring break by myself. :)

Estonians speak a mixture of Russian (the older generation), English (the younger generation), occasionally some German, and their own incomprehensible language. I was able to pick up a few words based on the cognates, but actually trying to speak more Estonian than ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ is ludicrously difficult. I actually managed to pass as a Russian student for most of Thursday, though, which made me quite happy. My practical Russian is pretty decent, it seems, even if I still can’t get certain cases right to save my life. The hostel staff actually spoke to me in Russian for two days, until they tried to have me check out Friday morning and I kindly informed them that I’d paid for another night, so they swapped me into another room. Again. They’re very nice people, anyway, if not terribly organized.

And thus we come to Friday. I was trying to attend a Good Friday mass in Estonian, but I couldn’t find the little church I’d stumbled across on Wednesday that gave me the idea. I went to a good four churches before finding one that was actually supposed to have a service later in the day, so I set off intending to do some souvenir shopping. This turned into my failing at several ATMs, growing suspicious, and returning to the hostel and my internet connection to discover that some bastard had cleaned out my bank account in the past two days. I don’t know what someone was doing making almost $1300 worth of purchases on the Eurolines website (especially seeing as my own Eurolines tickets—paid in CASH—cost me about $60), but I got on the Skype-phone to the bank and my email to my parents immediately. We think we’ve resolved the problem, or at least enabled me to withdraw money to get around Petersburg, but this is massively annoying. I ended up doing my shopping after changing the 30 euros I had as a backup in my wallet. :P

But, eventually, I returned from shopping with a few good purchases, made dinner in the hostel kitchen (pasta in the coffee pot) with Will and Sebastian, a Spaniard working in Finland, and went to mass. I did end up finding a Good Friday mass in what I think was a mixture of Estonian and Latin, in a church that I’m pretty sure was devoted to St. Nicholas. And before you comment on my not actually knowing the name, everything was written in Church Slavonic, which is an incomprehensible Russian alphabet. I didn’t understand a word, and I followed everyone else’s motions; luckily, there wasn’t any sitting and standing to worry about, because you stand for the entire service. Russian Orthodox churches have no benches, so you stand in a large group behind the priest in the middle of the floor and try not to sway when your legs get tired. But it was fascinating. Somber, mysterious, and completely foreign to me. I spent a good part of the sermon studying the mosaics on the walls, which are amazing. For a historic church in such a small city, St. Nicholas’s is right up there with at least Spassnaya Krava for the grandness of its décor.

I returned to the hostel room to meet two Spanish guys, a Czech student, and a Quebecois, most of whom were planning for a party in a friend’s room in the hostel. We sat and talked for quite some time in an interesting mixture of languages, but I politely declined their offer to join them in their reveling; if I need to be up at five o’clock in the morning, I am NOT willing to risk being hung over as well as exhausted. Even though Nathan from Montreal snores like a chainsaw, I did manage to get some decent sleep and make it out of the hostel at five a.m. with no trouble. Finding the bus station was a little more trouble, as there are three bus stations marked on the map, and I ended up at both of the wrong ones before hopping a tram to the right one. I still got to the station an hour and a half before my bus, but this is never a problem for me when I’ve brought two novels along. :) The only remaining hassle in the trip was Russian customs, but the drug-sniffing dog was a little hyperactive, so the border guards were more concerned with keeping it from leaping up on people than going through our baggage. (It was a cute little spotted dog, named Jan, I think. I would have stopped to pet him, but I don’t think that would have gone over very well.)

Upcoming: return to Baltisky Voksal, head six stops up the Red Line, walk back to the apartment, and try to shower before collapsing. I’ve actually managed to get some good sleep on the bus ride, so I don’t think that’ll be a problem. Enough with this vacation business; can we get back to classes now?